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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Women may claim Nigella for their own, but her appeal is to anyone against prudish asceticism, anyone who believes in the goodness of pleasure. On every show, Lawson runs through three or four recipes based on a theme -- "All Day Breakfast," "Comfort Food," "Slow-Cook Weekend," "Rainy Days" and "Trashy" are among the individual episode titles. Those subjects tell the story, a tale of indulgence and pleasure, and a sustained commitment to the sensual.
Lawson is definitely not a food snob. She has never lost her connection to comfort food, and she has no disdain for the lowly dishes some cooks would not even attempt. In the show called "Trashy," she shows you how to cook Elvis' beloved fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. In the accompanying book "Nigella Bites" Lawson writes, "This sandwich is a wondrous thing, gloriously exemplifying what cooking is all about: the whole is so much intriguingly, confoundingly more than the sum of its parts."
That genuine, unironic appreciation of something so generally derided is the key to her sensibility. It's a measure of the conservatism of the times in which we live, conservatism that exists across the political divide, that sensualism has become associated with grossness, immaturity. To be thought of as adults, we should appreciate steamed vegetables, but not lovingly prepared fried chicken. We should think more of Nicole Kidman's drab and pinched Virginia Woolf in "The Hours" than we do of her in spangles and top hat emitting little squeals of pleasure in "Moulin Rouge." We should think of sex as solely the means to a deeper spiritual connection rather than as just fun.
"The hell with all of it!" is the implicit message of Nigella Lawson. Even when she addresses the restorative food to eat after one binge too many, as she does in the "Nigella Bites" episode "Temple Food," she cannot suppress her sensual nature. Slicing a duck breast for "Gingery-Hot Duck Salad," Lawson pours the blood back into the sauce she prepares for dressing the salad. Holding the bloody carving board, she says, "If you weren't here, I'd be licking this." Of course she would. It's the frosting-on-the-beater moment, the quest for the crackling in a pan that's just held a roast pork, the sucking of bare rib bones to get any stray bits of meat still clinging. It speaks of enjoyment and, I think, of love, not only for the food itself, but for the people you prepare it for, and for your own abilities to savor it.
Lawson is an instinctive, rather than a precise cook, often providing only the barest information about measurements, cooking times, and so forth. I don't think that's just a ploy to get you to buy the program's $35 accompanying volume of "Nigella Bites" for the recipe details. More than one person I know who loves watching Lawson has complained to me that her printed recipes are not always reliable (many of the complaints center on her baking book "How to Be a Domestic Goddess"). I think her watch-and-learn method is an attempt to impart a sense of freedom to her audience. Just as she will not be contained by traditional notions of what constitutes fine cuisine (which, of course, leads to a broader, deeper, more profound appreciation of "fine," one freed of finickiness), she does not want people to be constrained by the strictures of a recipe. She envisions the kitchen as sexologists have envisioned the bedroom -- a place to discover your own way of doing things, a place to be true to what tastes good to you.
That may make her more of a guide for experienced cooks. It's an oddity of cookbooks that some of the more complex and exact recipes to be found from gifted chefs are often easier for beginning cooks than the "basic" cookbooks they are often given as gifts. God only knows how many beginner chefs, how many sons and daughters going into their own apartments for the first time, have been given "The Joy of Cooking." It took me years to appreciate that book. Every time I looked up a basic recipe, there were at least two or three of those damn arrows directing me to another recipe I had to learn before embarking on the one I wanted to make. Simplicity is the hardest thing to learn. I'm fairly confident roasting a chicken (or frying it), throwing together biscuits for breakfast or strawberry shortcake (I'm not too modest to say that my biscuits have been praised by Southerners on at least two occasions) or preparing a tomato sauce for pasta. When it comes to chicken soup, the best I can yet hope for is my wife to taste it and say, "It's almost as good as your mother's" (and for her to be right). As for salad dressing, that condiment that Julia Child claims is so easy to make she sees no reason for buying it bottled -- forget it. I've been left with an oily, tasteless mess so often that I thank the cooking gods for Brianna's Asiago Caesar dressing.
If you have some sense of what you like, and find cooking not just a means to an end but something sustaining in itself, then the freedom Lawson extends can be liberating. Watching her, I often find myself trying to think of things I can substitute for some of her ingredients (particularly her fondness for vile cilantro), and that, I suspect, is the sort of improvisation she hopes to inspire. For instance, her recipe for steak Mirabeau -- steak pan-fried in butter and olive oil and then topped with a sauce of reduced red wine and mashed anchovy fillets -- calls for the steak to be topped with sliced black olives. I hate the little buggers. So I just leave them off and I'm still left with that steak, the flavor of the meat accompanied by the richness of the wine and given some bite by the salty fishiness of the anchovies.
Every episode of "Nigella Bites" ends with the same coda -- Nigella in her pj's sneaking into her darkened kitchen for a late night run on the fridge. It can be a plate of mini pancakes, one -- preferably two -- slices of cake, or, when nothing appeals, she might just grab a shade of the nail polish she keeps in there (living with a woman who does the same, I'm used to seeing a selection of tiny, colored bottles at the back of the fridge). It's the perfect ending, an ode to what spoilsports tell you isn't good for you -- eating late at night -- and a stop that leads you, as I think Lawson or any true sensualist would want it, to bed.
